Byzantium

Interview With the Vampire on estrogen.

Clara is all sex and fangs. The 200-year-old strumpet and
grifter has just beheaded a man and is on the run again, and she nearly
pops out of her cheap corset and snakeskin pants trying to distance
herself and her immortal daughter from an old (and undead) boys club.
While Clara (Gemma Arterton) prowls for girls to pimp out to
businessmen, her daughter Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) offs sick old ladies
in nursing homes.This
sad-eyed, conflicted angel of mercy spends most of her days in silence,
scribbling down her history and throwing it out open windows; she purses
her mouth in a tight line to hold back her desire to scream her tale to
passersby. “There’s a story there. You can feel it,” one curious old
man says of her…right before she bleeds him.

Byzantium is
obsessed with silence and secrets—and the price you pay for keeping or
breaking both. Director Neil Jordan’s moody vampire story unspools in a
clammy English seaside town across two centuries, flashing between
forever-teenage Eleanor’s tentative present-day romance and
forever-whore Clara’s truly oddball 19th-century origin tale, which
revolves around a syphilitic scumbag played with overblown zeal by Jonny
Lee Miller.

It all feels like a
very stylish, noir piece of Anne Rice fan fiction, which makes sense:
Jordan directed the still-divisive, Tom Cruise-starring adaptation of
Rice’s Interview With the Vampire. Byzantium is a
spiritual sequel to the 1994 flick—right down to the undead existential
ennui. The genders are switched, but themes of loss, dissatisfaction and
codependency are still front and center.

Most of the Dracula
trappings have been wiped away. The pair traipse around in daylight, and
when peckish they dispatch their prey with a spiky thumbnail. Yes, this
is annoying. Thankfully, there’s still blood—arterial sprays, sticky
pools and even waterfalls of the red stuff—and epic mom-daughter
screaming matches. The movie has its eye-rolling moments, especially
Arterton’s overwrought outbursts, but Ronan fairly glows with forlorn
menace.

The fact that Byzantium is
a genuinely tense and sexy thriller doesn’t actually matter. For fang
fans, vampire movies are a lot like pizza—there’s no such thing as a bad
one. Byzantium works because its vamp trappings are wedded to a
family crime story that’s truly unsettling. Living with your mother for
200 years—what could be more terrifying than that?